


You Were A Kindness

by AlwaysLera



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Dissociation, F/M, Natasha comes to SHIELD, PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychological Trauma, Rape Recovery, Self Harm, Sex Trafficking, Trauma, allusions to childhood sexual abuse, allusions to rape, self injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 10:50:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysLera/pseuds/AlwaysLera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was not true what they said. There was no rooftop battle. She did not try and seduce Hawkeye. When she came to SHIELD, she was not whole. She was not the Black Widow. She had not been the Black Widow for a long time. It was a title she would earn back over years, long after she had chosen a new name, found herself again, learned to trust, and learned to love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Were A Kindness

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of rape, sexual violence, possible sex trafficking, sex crimes, dissociation, and a character recovering from major trauma. Please take care of yourself first and foremost. Thank you <3

 

 

            She liked to hear her feet hitting the ground. The steady _clap clap clap clap_ of her sneakers against the surface of the city streets felt like the world affirming that she was _alive, alive, alive, alive_. There was something about the loudness of it that comforted her. Even her own breathing couldn’t drown out her steps the way her breathing drowned out her heartbeat. When she left the Red Room, she hunkered in the basement of abandoned buildings in a derelict town in southern Spain where unemployment was rampant and it was easy enough to slip between the cracks of a warehouse, hide between druggies, learn to pick out the shape of sharps on the floor in the dark. She used to take her pulse then, time it on her wrist watch, reassure herself that her pulse was normal for a woman of her height, size, weight, and fitness level. Normality made her feel alive, then.

            It was not true what they said. There was no rooftop battle. She did not try and seduce Hawkeye. When she came to SHIELD, she was not whole. She was not the Black Widow. She had not been the Black Widow for a long time. It was a title she would earn back over years, long after she had chosen a new name, found herself again, learned to trust, and learned to love.

When Hawkeye found her, she had thrown herself over a bridge into an icy river. February was the worst month. The numbness in her hands had frozen some part of her mind that had clung to sanity and rationality. She wanted to feel something, or feel nothing at all. She walked over the bridge every day, back and forth, back and forth, staring into the dark waters that churned just beneath her. She watched children throw sticks into the water, dark fragments of once living trees that bobbed then drowned.

            She felt like a branch snapped off a tree. The freedom she felt in the ungrounding from the Red Room was lost in the blur of winter and the way her edges began to fade, watercolor on canvas, increasingly less defined. There was no freedom in losing what once kept one alive. There was no freedom in the type of death she had chosen. She could not sleep for the pictures that played on her eyelids at night. She could not tolerate being awake for the lack of direction, a life without a compass, the inability to see the North Star with all the lights of the broken, dirty city she had chosen.

            She stood on the slippery bars of the bridge and looked at the chunks of ice floating in the dark current below her. For a moment, she thought she was seeing the Milky Way, the river reflecting the night sky and all of its mysteries and all of its possibilities. And in that moment, she saw the type of freedom she wanted.

            She jumped. The icy water was exactly what she wanted as it slammed through her body, bullets of cold that sliced through her skin, shattering her bones, releasing her from all the ties to earth she no longer wanted.

            He pulled her out of the water. She heard the splash and willed it to be a branch, a log, a dog, anything other than someone who thought she was someone who wanted, or deserved, to be saved. But hands closed around her arm and he pulled her out onto the shore. She looked up at him, gasping for air, at the way her skin spasmed like her erratic heartbeat, and thought he looked familiar. He was short, muscular, angry. He spat water out onto the ground next to her and glared at her.

            “Are you fucking nuts?” he asked her.

            She closed her eyes. There were no words for what she was. A monster, a loose, accidental monster that twisted reality and lost track of up and down. The world did not need more people like her. The world did not need anchors. The world needed birds.

            His chest was heaving next to her as he tried to breath and both of their bodies were shaking from the cold. He didn’t say anything more to her. He hauled her upright and studied her face, clasped between his hands, and she did not pull away. He would leave now and she’d go back into the river to die. Or lay on the shore and die of hypothermia. One of those things would happen if he would just walk away from her. She didn’t want a white knight. She wanted to be left alone. She wanted to be a branch thrown into the dark river. She wanted to be lost. She didn’t want to be found.

            She did not deserve to be found. She didn’t deserve to want, either.

            He complicated things when he said quietly, “You didn’t have to go over the bridge, sweetheart.”

            Her heart tightened. Then he added, “I’ve been looking for you since you went rogue. I was supposed to take you out. They thought you were a free agent.”

            Her body tensed. Ready to react. The river was 5.03 meters behind him and was traveling at a speed of 250 meters per minute. She could be dead and floating down river before he got to her if she could only get there and beneath the bridge before he got back into the water. She should have jumped off the other side of the bridge.

            “Don’t go over the bridge,” he said, his voice still quiet. His eyes still sharp on hers. She knew him now. Hawkeye. The SHIELD sniper. He looked different up close. She imagined she was one of his only marks who got to see him. She knew his stats. Knew the impossible shots he took and made. She knew that she had once been sent to kill him. “Come back with me.”

            She pulled away then but she was shaking she was so cold and he was stronger than her. She had spent the last six months eating poorly and sleeping on cement around needles and needle users. He held her wrists close to him. “To SHIELD. Not like that.”

            She didn’t have the strength to say no. She didn’t have the strength to say yes. She simply let him pull her back to a hotel where he sat her on a bed and reappeared with clothes. His clothes. He put a turtleneck, a sweater, and sweatpants on the bed next to her. He frowned at them. He looked at her, and then back at the clothes. His wet clothes still stuck to his body in ways that made her want to look, and ways that made her want to look away as if she had never seen the lines and muscles that made up the male body before then.

            “The pants will be big. They have a drawstring. Either way. Sleep. We’ll head out tomorrow. Shower’s that way. Try not to kill yourself.” It was said lightly, but Natasha flinched visibly. His voice softened again. “Easy, Natalia.”

            She flinched again. “That’s not my name.”

            He looked confused. “It isn’t?”

            She looked past him at the bright white light of the bathroom. “No.”

            He made a noise that sounded like he understood. “Warm up, Romanov.”

            Only when she was in the shower did she realize he had been speaking Russian the entire time. She shuddered. She wondered if he intended on claiming his prize here, when she was naked under the warm spray of water, watching her blue and reddened skin turn colors, white then pink again, or when she was asleep. She knew it would be coming and she did not particularly care how it happened. Her hands were not her hands. Her legs were not her legs. The dark places inside of her where men slipped their secrets before she slit their necks were no longer hers. They had been taken from her a long time ago. They were no longer hers to use. She no longer wanted to use them. He could take her if he wanted. She did not care.

            She once read in a book by CS Lewis that she was not a body. She was a soul that had a body. She liked that and as she stood under a spray of water that never ceased in being warm, she thought of her soul. She was a blackened soul with a damaged body. There was no hope for a soul like hers. There was no healing for a body like hers.

            She climbed out of the shower, leaving it running, and pulled on the warm clothes without toweling herself off. It did not matter. She walked out of the bathroom and found him tapping away on a laptop on the couch. He looked up, blinked, and nodded to her, before returning to his screen.

            She studied him for a long moment. He wasn’t afraid of her. He did not think she would slit his neck. He did not study her body like it was something he wanted. He did not look at her soul like it was something he loathed. He was a strange creature, there in the corner. She sat on the bed. There was only one. Her heart seized in her chest and she let herself go. Let herself drift down the cold river in her mind, up into the sky, away to the waterfall, and into the stars. Let herself be nothing but a branch. Let herself be nothing but stardust.

            Stardust could not be hurt. Stardust could not be used. Stardust could not be held.

            She woke in the morning, disoriented and warm and alone. She touched the spaces between her legs and found nothing there. She rolled over and found Hawkeye on the couch, awake and freshly showered, typing again on his laptop. She sat up and looked at him in confusion. He glanced up at her, gave her a crooked half smile, and pointed to the bedside table where there were eggs and coffee and sausage. Her stomach heaved with desire. Her stomach heaved with the knowledge that if she ate the food her stomach craved, she’d throw it straight back up. When she looked back over at Hawkeye, he was focused on his computer again.

            “You can eat it,” he said without looking up. His Russian was better than she expected. “I didn’t poison it. But if you want me to eat some first, I understand.”

            It was cruel, this kindness he showed her. It was unnerving. She was a stranger. He knew—he must for he was sent to kill her—of her capabilities. And yet, she sat in his warm clothes in a warm bed and he had neither killed her nor fucked her. And he made assumptions about why she did not want to touch the food. He made no sense, this gentle gray-eyed man who had more confirmed kills under his belt than she had under hers.

            “We’re leaving in two hours. SHIELD has agreed to give you amnesty from them, and protect you from the Red Room.” He got up and moved across the room. She watched him, her eyes track his movements, waiting for the weapons or the suggestive pass at her. His every motion was masculine. The way he turned away from her to pull a sweater over his head, his shirt rising up to expose pale, muscular skin. He moved with a surety about the boundaries of himself. She remembered, vaguely, feeling like that. She had always been aware of the power in her own body. He moved like it was second nature. Like he was no longer aware of it because it was so much a part of him.

            She wondered if he ever looked at dark rivers and thought about going over the edge.

            “Yeah,” he said, startling her. She flushed hot when she realized she had spoken aloud. He looked over his shoulder at her, zipping up his bag and shouldering it. “I thought about it a lot years ago. Sometimes I think my wilder nights were half-hearted attempts. I’m not saying it gets better, Romanov. I’m saying it can. You don’t have to join SHIELD. But it’s gotta be better than whatever shit hole you found to live in. You look like death warmed over and you looked like before you went into the river. I can’t tell you what your life was like before this, but I can tell you that at least with SHIELD, you know you’re making your own calls, controlling your own life, and making your own choices.”

            She was ashamed of the way her voice cracked. “I don’t know how to do that.”

            He didn’t look surprised and her heart thawed a little, tiny cracks on the icy surface. “I know. It takes time. Did you throw a knife perfectly the first time you threw a knife?”

            She hadn’t. And she had been hit in the temple until she threw it correctly. She only shrugged. He didn’t see the memories in her eyes. He just said, “It’s like that. You have to keep practicing.” He paused, and then met her eyes with a directness that frightened her. “But it hurts less. I promise you, from here on out, whatever you chose and wherever you go, it hurts less than what came before this. Before the bridge.”

            She looked away because she couldn’t hold the understanding and truths that settled in his light gray eyes. They reminded her of the sky at home. She wished they were as dark as they had been last night at the river. She followed him out of the hotel. The fight that once made her who she was was nothing more than a flickering spark inside of her, something that kept her legs moving and her heart beating, but she didn’t have the stomach or the strength to argue with the archer.

            On the way to a plane waiting at the airport, he turned and said over the shoulder. “I didn’t tell them about the bridge. I told them that we had had a showdown on a rooftop and you agreed to come in.”

            She was losing track of the kindnesses he was showing her. She wondered how he intended on cashing in for the favors. She wondered how many times she would have to ice over her heart to allow him to have what he wanted. She wanted to believe he wasn’t like the others, but they were all the same. He would be like them eventually too. He would take what all men wanted, and leave her the way he intended to leave her. Without the warmth of his kindnesses. Without the truth of his words. The hollowness of truth was the only thing she understood.

            She tripped onto the plane. He steadied her, and released her hand immediately. They sat side by side. He gave her the ear muffs and as they flew out of Spain, he pointed out landmarks to her out the tiny window. His body was warm next to hers. She clenched her hands in fists on her lap. When they landed, she shied away from his touch, and he didn’t seem to notice or care. She wished he had.

            A thin balding man with frighteningly sharp eyes held out his hand. “I’m Agent Phil Coulson. Welcome to SHIELD, Ms. Romanov.”

            “Natasha,” she said faintly. She swallowed and tried again. “Natasha.”

            Coulson’s eyes flitted over her shoulder to the archer standing behind her. “Welcome, Natasha.”

            She didn’t know whether she should cry or hug him or thank him or do anything. There was nothing in her mind that gave her the protocols for handling defecting to a rival organization. She had never been trained for this. There would be expectations and she was unprepared for them. Panic, a strange and wildly unfamiliar sensation, seized her throat and gripped it between cold and long fingers.

            Two fingers touched the small of her back, and there was Hawkeye, saying in that quiet steady way of his, “Just walk inside, Natasha. That’s all for now.”

            So she walked inside. She sent herself over the bridge and over the moon as they stripped her, looking for listening devices, examining her and weighing her and photographing her as if they were preparing to kill her and stuff her for an exhibit. She imagined what her body would look like at the taxidermist. She wondered if the taxidermist would take liberties with her body. She had known men who liked their women to be unconscious or dead. A man who funded the Red Room bought the girls they killed for incompetency. She had been sent to guard a delivery one time. He had made her stand there and watch him fuck the girl’s stiff body into a couch. She had heard bones break. She thought it strange that the body did not bleed. Her nails bit into her palms when he came with a shout.

            They gave her new clothes. Warm black pants made of the softest cotton. A long sleeved black shirt. She sat crosslegged on the examination table, waiting for what came next. The interrogation, the torture, the way they would shave her head, beat her unconscious and she would wake with new memories and a strange sensation heavy in her gut.

            The balding man came in again and leaned on the wall opposite of her. He held a manila folder in his hand and a blank notebook. “How do you feel?”

            She said nothing. She was not sure what he wanted her to say. She did not feel anything other than the heartening buzz of anticipation. The things that came next she understood. They would make sense in her reality. She could put them in boxes in her head and shut herself away. She knew the procedures for handling torture and interrogation. She had been trained to tolerate this. She had been trained to excel at this. She wanted this to happen. She needed the pain to feel. She could not answer his question until he moved on with this process.

            He nodded when she remained silent. “Understandable. If you have anything you’d like to share about the Red Room, we would appreciate it. But your information was not why we offered you amnesty and the opportunity to join this side.”

            She blinked. Confusion slipped through her veins languidly, making her feel dizzy and drunk.

            He put the notebook down next to her with a felt tip pen. “Just in case. There will be a staff member by shortly to show you to your rooms. Until you adjust to life here on the base, you will need an escort everywhere you go. Agent Barton will help you.”

            She steadied herself on the table, looked at the notebook, and looked back at the balding man. “Why?”

            “Because you are young. Because we know what the Red Room did to its girls,” said the balding man, his voice not as quiet as Hawkeye’s but just as controlled and steady, “and Barton believes in you. His word goes a long way inside these halls.”

            There was a warning there and she did not fully understand the parameters within the words. She swallowed and said, “When do I have to go to work for you?”

            “When Barton and I feel you are ready,” he answered, beginning to walk toward the door. “And before you ask when that is, it’s when you stop asking that question.”

            She couldn’t remember the question she asked.

            She spent days and months feeling like a kaleidoscope. Colorful spots tripping over the boundaries of patterns and mistakenly believing that they could not be twisted, turned into new patterns. She felt shaken and unsteady. She woke with nightmares when she slept. When she didn’t sleep, she was seized by compulsions she couldn’t stop. She counted mercilessly. She paced endlessly. She created games and rituals. She created rituals to break her rituals. She refused to turn left for two days. She turned on and off light switches, reveling in the way Hawkeye’s pupils contracted and expanded in front of her as he stood, watching her with his increasingly frustratingly steady gaze. He never asked her to stop.

            They went running together. They boxed together. They spared and lifted weights. She didn’t see a single weapon but knew in the icy cavern of her chest that the secret was she was the weapon. She was never without Barton, and he never minded that she barely said a word. He kept up a steady stream of chatter and it took her a long time to understand that while he was open with his mouth and kindnesses, he was closed with his mind and heart. His ramblings were aimless. His kindnesses were unmistakably accidental.   

            She studied the edges of him, pushing him. He never touched her, reached for her, or acted like he wanted her. He never studied her body more than was necessary to dodge her fist when they spared. If she brushed up against him, he did not stiffen though he moved away. Nothing twitched between his legs. She wondered if he was gay. She wondered if he had been injured in the field of duty. She listened to the gossip in the cafeteria where no one sat near them and everyone stared at them. She heard them murmur that he must be fucking her. She figured he must like women. Still, she could not understand his end game.

            She landed a punch one day in the kidney, swept out her foot, and he slammed onto the map with a grunt, his eyes widening at the ceiling. Then he grinned lazily and pounded his fist three times on the blue mats while she breathed heavily, staring at him. “Well done, Widow.”

            She grunted back at him, stalking to the edge of the mat where they kept their water bottles. They had an audience, per usual. She eyed the people who shifted their eyes from her to him. Except for a few men who stared at her, their eyes tracing the sweat running down her body. She watched one adjust his pants and she smiled. At least she still had it in her. At least it wasn’t Barton.

            “What’s up with you today?” he asked, still on the mat. She kicked his water bottle toward him. He didn’t mind. “You’re normally quiet—“ she snorted at the understatement as he raised his voice slightly, “—but today, you look at me like you’re feral.”

            She frowned, rolling the word around on her tongue. They spoke in English these days, when she spoke at all. “Feral.”

            He sat up and guzzled water. He released the bottle with a satisfied pop and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Wild.”

            She narrowed her eyes at him. “I do not like to be called Widow.”

            He shrugged. “Too bad.”

            Normally he agreed to any changes she requested in her life. She stared at him in confusion, and then something inside of her lit up and warmed. His eyes held hers and they were brighter, glinting like the metal of a gun. He was challenging her. She sucked in a breath and tossed down her water bottle. She walked over to him and kicked him lightly with her foot. “Get up.”

            “No.” His tone changed, steadied and strong, anchors dropping into the dark water of her mind. His eyes never left hers.

            She growled and stalked a circle around him. “Get up. Fight me.”

            “I am,” he replied, his eyes tracking her. His body was taut like a bowstring. She wanted to run her hands over every line over him. Her instant desire surprised her and she stepped back from him, shocked out of her anger. He studied her and said nothing. She backed up a few steps and then forced herself to stare at his eyes and not his body. She stepped forward. His grin was ferocious. Heat ran through her veins.

            Natasha spat out, “Get on your feet and hit me.”

            He shook his head. “I won’t hit you when you’re angry.”

            “I am not angry,” she hissed, shaking out her arms. “Get up, you coward.”

            His eyes burned in her, silver intoxicating her. If she were unreal, she would be dead. He reminded her of cold Spanish cities at night, of Russian winter skies, of knives in the snow, of the way it felt to slip her hands beneath the sheets and between her legs when her body was hers.

            He stood up and her mind buzzed with so much electricity that it flickered off, white light spinning on the edges of her tunnel vision. He picked up his water bottle and stalked off the mat, through the crowd of stunned onlookers, and into the men’s locker room. She watched him in disbelief, then turned and stalked to her own locker room where she took a very long cold shower. She did not expect him to be waiting for her when she finally stepped out, wearing clean clothes. But he was, arms crossed, eyes closed, leaning against the wall. He opened one eye to peer at her, and she felt her ribs twist to protect her heart when his eye was no longer molten metal glinting. He looked her up and down, taking in her wet hair and the slight shiver of her body.

            His grin was crooked and all too human. It made the feral part of her stretch and yawn, waking up inside of her chest that bubbled, warm and frothing. She wanted to push him against a wall and kiss him. She wanted to slip her hand into his pants. She wanted to know that she had an effect on him the way he affected her. She wanted to throw him off balance the way he made her feel wobbly on an orbit she was only just beginning to know.

            “Cold shower?” he said, his voice low so only she could hear. He clucked his tongue. “You’re easy, Widow.”

            And like that, the light shut off inside of her. The teasing tone in his voice reminded her of so many others. The way they whispered to her how they wanted her body. The way they said she was easy, the way they called her a whore. The way they took things without asking and she let them without questioning because in a prior life, she was only a body.

            She said to him, “You are like the others.”

            She stayed just long enough to watch the shock register in his eyes, just long enough to watch him lean backward away from her, inhaling so sharply that his arms fell away from his chest, before she walked past him and out the door of the gym.

            She was free in the base for the first time by herself. She wandered aimlessly for a long time. She knew every inch of it by this point, but she liked the way that people looked at her, and then looked around her for Barton. She liked the way they realized she was alone. She liked the fear in their eyes. They should fear her. She had killed men with her thighs and her hands. She had brought powerful men to their deaths by offering them a small dark space inside of her that did not belong to her. She gave away parts of herself and destroyed worlds, shattered families, undid democracies, caused chaos. She was dangerous.

            She tried to sleep. She couldn’t breath. She did push-ups on the floor. One hundred and twenty seven of them. She liked prime numbers. She took another shower. She drew a knife across her skin. She licked the blood off her arm. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling of the bathroom until the fluorescent light burned her eyes. And finally, she fell asleep.

            She dreamt of Barton. She dreamt that he was trapped in a burning building and she couldn’t find any way in. There were no doors, or windows, but she could hear him yelling for her inside. She heard him pounding on the walls. She woke, covered in sweat and terrified. She pulled on a tank top and ran out of her apartment, down the hall to his. She pounded on the door. Every second that passed, she felt bile rising farther up in her throat.

            He yanked open the door, his eyes swollen with sleep and his hair disheveled. He looked her up and down and studied the cut on her arm and the panic on her face. “Natasha? What’s wrong? What happened?”

            “I dreamt you were dying in a burning building,” she whispered in Russian.

            He touched her cheek cautiously, his eyes waking up as his thumb ran over the rise of her cheekbone. She shuddered at his touch and stared at the damp glistening liquid on his thumb when he pulled it away. She touched her own cheeks in wonder. She couldn’t remember the last time that she cried. She stared at the dampness on her hands in confusion.

            Barton opened the door wider and said quietly, “You should come in.”

            She wavered at the door, swaying back and forth as she wrapped her arms around her. “I can’t.”

            “I know you think that,” he said, his eyes intent on her face. “I know you think you know what I want. But I am not going to touch you, Natasha. I swear to you, you’re safe in here.”

            She had not thought herself unsafe before in all the rooms with beds where she had slept in the company of others. But there was a framework to his promise, a structure that she understood, and she nodded. She stepped through the doorway, still hugging herself. He shut the door behind her, and did not lock it. She stood in the middle of the small apartment, helpless. He flipped on the lights and she blinked, adjusting to the couch, the TV, the bookcase filled to the brim with tattered paperbacks and DVD cases. He walked away from her and she ran her eyes over his bare back, only now realizing he had been shirtless. There were scars on his back that she recognized. He disappeared silently through a doorway, and reappeared as he tugged a t-shirt down over his body. He didn’t look at her and she felt ashamed at his avoidance. He always looked at her. She liked when he looked at her.

            He rummaged through a cabinet and then put a small cream and a box of bandaids on the breakfast bar. He gestured for her to take a seat. “Come here. Fix your arm. Do you want tea?”

            She hesitated, dragging the chair out and hating the sound it made. “I’m sorry.”

            He gave her a small smile over his shoulder. “I don’t have that type of tea but I’ll look for it.”

            She gave him a wary smile in return. “Something uncaffeinated.”

            He nodded and stuck two mugs in his microwave, starting it, and tossed two tea bags on the counter. He turned around and leaned against the stove, his arms crossed over his chest. Now he looked at her, studying her in that way that made her want to squirm and look away, so she did.

            “I hate when people analyze dreams,” he said, his tone far more nonchalant than his words. “So I’m not going to ask about your dream. But I’m alive and I’m real and I’m not going to die in a burning building.”

            She swallowed, her hands trembling in her lap. “I don’t dream.”  When she peered over at him through her lashes, he had a strange look on his face. He said nothing and finally she said with a sour tone, “Don’t look at me like that.”

            “You have as many kills as I do under your belt. You’re more than eight years younger than me. You were engineered, hijacked, programmed, abused, and farmed out by an extremely powerful organization for most of your life. I’ve seen you work. I’ve seen you take down men with only a smile. But since the bridge, I haven’t seen that woman at all. I’ve only seen a girl who has no idea who she is. And then today, I thought I saw a spark of a woman who knows who she is and she’s not the cold-hearted killer and she’s not a little girl.” The microwave beeped and he shut up long enough to pull both mugs free and sit them on the counter. She silently watched him put a tea bag in each. When he approached her with her tea, she forced herself not to shrink away from him. He met her eyes again. “I wish I knew how to help you, Natasha.”

            She flinched again and looked away. “Maybe I don’t want your help.”           

            “Maybe,” he agreed easily and without resentment. “Can I amend that? I wish I knew how to help you without frightening you.”

            Instinctively she replied, “You don’t frighten me.”

            He leaned forward, she leaned back, and he leaned back again, giving her a small smile. “It’s not that I frighten you. It’s that everyone who ever came before me frightened you. What you said in the gym today--,”

            “I don’t want to talk about that.” Her voice pitched and cracked upwards, a spider fracture in her glass veneer.

            He stilled and steadied his voice, she felt the way he reached for her with his words instead of his hands. “Then we won’t talk about that. Natasha, I’m not going anywhere.”

            “Why?” she asked, her voice a hushed whisper. She could hear the way he shifted on his bare feet. She watched him beneath lowered glances. She needed to know why he wouldn’t leave when she didn’t even know who she was, when what she gave the world was a different girl every day like she was trying on masks, like she was Goldilocks sitting in a different chair every day to try on new perspectives on the world, to find the one that fit. She wanted what she felt in the gym. She wanted the give and take, the way her body and heart burst to life when he challenged her with his words and his instincts. She wanted him. She wanted him and she had never wanted anyone before. She did not know how to want him properly. She did not know how to want him without all the hands on her before him pressing their weight and their memory and their burden into her until she burst from the bruising.

            “I don’t know.” He sipped at his tea, made a face, and found honey on the counter. He poured a bunch into his tea and offered it to her. She accepted it. Their fingertips brushed and her body tensed. He pretended not to notice and she pretended not to notice that she noticed he was only pretending. He looked into the tea, stirring the honey slowly, his spoon clanking against the sides of the mugs. “Because I remember the look in your eyes when I pulled you out of the river. You were so angry with me. And I remember thinking that if you wanted to live as badly as you wanted to die, you’d probably do okay in life.”

            The response startled her and she looked up at him, confused. “I don’t want to die. Not anymore.”

            His eyes were guarded, gated, stone walls she had never seen before in his expression. “Do you want to live?”

            She hesitated just long enough for him to raise an eyebrow at her proving his point. They sat there for a long time sipping at their tea, a bar between them. Then finally Barton sat down his mug and lifted his chin. “Okay. What do you want from me?”

            Her mind brightened and she clamped down on the way her body lit up at the question. She steadied herself before shrugging as casually as she could manage and saying, “A friend.”

            He nodded, bright eyed. “A friend.”

            It surprised Natasha, when she said it, because it was true. And it did not feel hollow. It felt very real. Solid. And warm. She lifted the mug to her mouth and sipped at the tea again. When she put the mug down, she said shyly to him, making herself meet his eyes, “I have never had a friend before.”

            The smile he gave her in return could have lit up the whole world.

            They became friends. It startled Natasha that friendship was a process, not an event. It startled her that there were wrong moves and it angered her that she could mess things up, even in this. He found her after one of their fights punching a bag so hard that she broke her knuckles. He looked like he wanted to yell at her but he held his tongue as he bandaged her hands.

            “Why?” he asked her.

            She glared at him. “Because I want one thing in my life not to be a game. I am tired of losing at everything in this world.”

            He never touched her without permission so he held his hand up, soft-palmed, toward her face and she pressed her cheek into it, her silent apology. His thumb skimmed her cheek and he said quietly, “Even when I am pissed off at you and want to scream at you until I’m hoarse, you aren’t losing, Natasha. You can’t lose me.”

            She did not believe that was possible. Everyone left. No one stayed. The people on the base changed around her constantly. She wanted almost every day to take Clint into her bed. She ached with the knowledge that she could and he would. And she burned in the resentment of all the things it would change between them. She wanted to believe there was another way. That people could exist in her life without her fucking them then killing them. It took her awhile, but she slowly added people into the circle that had once been just her and Clint. She and Maria Hill became friends. Clint promised her that he’d personally kill Coulson if Coulson touched her, and so Coulson joined them for movie nights. It took Natasha weeks to sit on the couch with him, and even then, Clint sat between them. When Coulson reached across for the remote, Natasha shrank away from him, sinking backward into the cushions.

            She had been on couches with men before. She remembered their fingers on her body. Clint nudged her with his elbow, aware at this point that it was hands that frightened her more than anything. He whispered to her, “Easy, Tasha.”

            She couldn’t remember when she got a nickname. She couldn’t remember when she started calling him Clint instead of Barton. It was a year before she was reliable enough on the base with any agent they threw at her, before she didn’t freeze up and shut down and sink into the dark cold waters of her mind. Clint stayed on base that entire year. She heard him and Coulson fighting about it one day. Clint had never been out of the field for that long before, but he swore and told Coulson that he’d take Natasha and leave if Coulson forced him away from the base.

            “Don’t,” Coulson said, his level even tone clipped with anger, “turn this into something I regret, Barton. You are a field agent.”

            “You want the Black Widow to be a balanced, stable person? You keep me here until she is balanced and stable. I don’t know why and she can’t tell me why, but I got through to her and trust me, her mind’s a twisted fucking place, Coulson. There are fucking booby traps every step. She’ll kill an agent for touching her arm in the cafeteria line right now.”

            “You know that I trust your judgment,” Coulson replied. “Especially in this realm.”

            “Fuck you.”

            Coulson snapped back, “It was meant as a compliment, Clint. For fuck’s sake.”

            There was a long pause and Natasha swayed on the other side of the door, her mind swimming and spinning and diving into depths where she couldn’t breathe. Then Clint said sullenly, “I know trauma, Phil. You know that no one knows how to level out like I do.”

            “I know. Get out of here. When you think she’s ready, I’ll put you in the field together.”

            She did not have time to move before Clint threw open the door and stepped almost right into her. He jerked backward and stared at her, fury on his face that he swept away with a deep sigh. She shook as she leaned against the wall. He studied her for a long moment and she shivered at the closeness of him. She had a personal space bubble, as Clint called it, the first lines on her self that she had drawn since he pulled her out of the river. He was the only one who came into her bubble.

            “You heard,” he said, and it was not a question, so she did not answer. He pressed his lips together and she thought for a moment he was angry at her. He shrugged, finally, and said, “You probably figured it out anyway.”

            He walked past her, expecting her to follow. She was busy trying to process everything she had learned from what had been said, and what had not been said. She fell into step beside him, and said nothing at all. When he had her practice sparring a male agent that afternoon, she gritted her teeth and pushed away the dark waters in her head. She treaded her way to the shore. Found the bridge. Walked over instead. She won the fight. She was herself the entire time.

            That smile outside the ring. She’d do about anything for that smile.

            They went on a few small missions, and they weren’t disasters. She just didn’t know who she was when she came home. She felt dazed, cold, frostbitten and lost. Blizzards in her mind. Bridges with no road across. She stumbled off planes. Gripped his arms. Successful missions did not always mean successful aftermaths. She grew frustrated with her own inability to pull herself together.

            “I never had trouble after a mission before this,” she snapped, pacing Clint’s apartment. “There’s something broken in me. I broke. I’m never going to be able to work again.”

            He was laying on the couch, a football game on mute, watching her. He was, as always, caught halfway between concern and amusement. “You’re not broken.”

            She threw a shoe at him and he grinned as he ducked. She glared at him. “I did back to back missions before for the Red Room. I never needed time to figure out who I was. I never felt like there was static in my head.”

            “Maybe you didn’t feel like that because you never came down from missions,” he suggested, propping his head up on a pillow. She couldn’t look at him when he was like this. He was too attractive. She wanted to curl up next to him. She had never wanted to curl up next to anyone before. She had never done it, even if she had never wanted it. She glared at a poster on his wall. It was worse when his suggestions made sense.

            “Natasha,” he said gently. “You’re doing a good job. You’re staying present the whole time you are in the field. You listen to directions. You’ve killed people without having flashbacks or shutting down. You haven’t taken unnecessary risks. You come back and you’re a little fuzzy and quiet for a few days. It’ll get better.”

            “Will it? Did it for you?” She asked him, challenging him with her eyes.

            He didn’t rise to her bait. He shrugged and said, “My trauma was never connected to my career. I never had to deal with the things you did. I can’t tell you for sure. But I see it getting better. This is the third time we’ve been out in six weeks and you were that strange girl that no one believed could be the Widow for only a few hours.”

            “That might be as good as it gets,” she said, crossing her arms. His eyes never left his face. His self control was absurd and frustrating. “What then?”

            “Then that’s okay,” he said. “Will you just sit down and watch the game with me?”

            She didn’t think before she moved, crossing the floor and carefully easing herself down onto the couch next to him. He began to move, and then stilled as she stretched out, her body in front of his, her arms tight against her chest. For a long moment, neither of them moved. She stared stubbornly at the television, not really watching the game as much as keeping her eyes straight forward and trying not to shake.

            Finally, Clint sank back down onto the couch with a sigh. He reached over her head without saying a word for the remote and turned the game off mute. He did not touch her at all, holding his body away from her and she knew it was probably not comfortable for him, and she wasn’t particularly comfortable herself, but she didn’t dare move. If she moved now, she’d never do this again and the warmness in her chest was sinking through her heart and into her blood, running through her veins. She felt alive again. Frightened, but alive.

            “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “I just--,”

            “Shut up,” he said with a short laugh. She reached behind her and found his hand. She carefully lifted it up and pulled it over her hip. His arm fell into place and he said quietly, “Natasha.”

            She closed her eyes and said, “Please.”

            His breath was warm against the back of her neck. “Okay.”

            She fell asleep during the game. When she woke, she was disoriented, confused, and warm. And alone. She shifted backward, half expecting, and definitely hoping, to find Clint behind her on the couch. Instead, there was a blanket on top of her, a pillow under her head, and no Clint to be found. She sat up, running her fingers through her hair. The apartment was dark. His bedroom door was open and she could hear the soft hush of his breathing, a sound she now knew by heart thanks to field missions. She quietly slipped her shoes back on and left his apartment. It felt strange to stay there with him sleeping in another room, and she didn’t know that she could handle climbing into bed. She didn’t even know if he wanted that.

            She woke again, in her room, to a text message from him. She read it still sleepily curled up beneath her piles of blankets.

            Clint: you get home okay?

            She smiled and texted him back: Yeah

            She fell back asleep almost immediately. When she woke mid-morning, she had another text from him.

            Clint: was that you last night? Or was that a not-you?

            She sat up this time and studied the text. She wished she could understand where he was going with this line of questioning. He wanted to know if she made that choice or her dissociative brain had made the choice to lay with him on the couch. She knew the answer that was true. She just didn’t know the proper answer to give him. If he did not want her, then perhaps he wanted to give her an out. If he did want her, he wanted to know it was her because they couldn’t precede if it wasn’t her.

            Being real with boundaries and lines and a mind that was hers was infinitely more complicated than she ever thought it would be.

            She texted back: Me

            She left her cellphone behind when she went for a run because she was afraid of seeing his answer. When she arrived breathless back at her apartment, sweaty and desperate for a shower, Clint was waiting at her door, his hands shoved in his pockets. He looked up at her with some muddled mess of curiosity and wariness, lust and caution, swirling in his molten metal eyes. She stared at him for a long time then unlocked her door.

            “Hi,” she said warily.

            “Hey,” he said, coming off the wall. His eyes never left her eyes. “Can I come in?”

            She nodded, leaving the door open behind her. Her palms felt sweatier now than they did when she was running. She kicked off her shoes as she listened to the door click shut behind him and he walked through the small space of her studio apartment. He sat on the corner of the couch they had bought her from a yard sale a few months ago. He stared at the ground.

            Natasha closed her eyes. “Look, I’m sorry. I should have asked. It was presumptuous and I shouldn’t have---,”

            “I want to kiss you,” he said, interrupting her. When she opened her eyes, he fixed her with the same fierce stare he had given her a year ago on the mats in front of a crowd. She felt that same wildfire race through her now. She couldn’t breathe. He stood up, his hands coming out of his pockets. “I have wanted to kiss you since you woke up in that hotel room. It’s been two years and I promised you that I would never, ever touch you without permission. And I’m not breaking that promise, Natashka. Not now. I want to kiss you, but if you say no, I’ll walk out of here and we’ll still be friends.”

            He took a step toward her and she wished he could see inside her mind at the images she had printed in her imagination of her shoving him against a wall, him pinning her to a bed, and them both wanting every single moment of the push and the pull, the violence and lust and the wanting, the slowness and the roughness, and neither one of them remembering a single touch other than each others.

            She swore she wouldn’t play him, not like the others, so when her instincts told him to give him a coy smile now and taunt him, she only whispered, “Yes.”

            He did not kiss her against the wall. He cupped her face gently, like he was holding something precious, and his mouth asked permission. She had never been kissed like someone wanted her to know all their secrets, like someone who wanted to memorize the way her mouth moved and the way her lips felt and the ways her body reacted to his fingers on her lower back, his thumb against the flesh of her abdomen, his other hand steadying her head so that when they parted, just slightly, her cheek trembled against his entire palm.

            Clint said quietly, “Still Natasha?”

            She smiled a bit. “Still Natasha.”

            She was not a kaleidoscope, but a kaleidoscope of colors tumbled through her, disorganized rainbows as scattered as her heart and her emotions. Her mind was a cool still summer lake, until splashes made her heart skip a beat and her eyelids burst open against his skin as she gasped. There were no bridges taunting her, no ice winding its way through her chest. She was stardust in his hands. She had never felt so coveted. She understood that he was touching her, not her body. His hands were on her, not her body. He wanted her, not the dark spaces inside of her given to so many before him. Every part of her warmed, heated, flashed with fire and sparks, brightened in light and smoldered like hot coals under his touch. And through it all, he checked in with her, whispering the name she had chosen with his fingers on her back as a question, and she repeated as an answer, a prayer, a sigh, a gratitude, a kindness passed between them. 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic and its title were somewhat inspired by the song You Were A Kindness by The National. Look it up and read the lyrics...it's very applicable :) Thanks for reading!


End file.
